With Trump the “apparent” loser of the Presidential election, there is increasing discussion about his exposure to criminal prosecution once he departs the White House. The common refrain echos what we Americans grow up believing, that no one is above the law.
Mobbing is a cynical crime constructed on the belief that medical professionals are above the law. At least, the crime of mobbing as I have experienced it here in Seattle’s South Cedar Park neighborhood abuses our trust in and societal regard for medical professionals, to make good a predatory crime of civil and human rights.
I’m a regular listener of This American Life, Ira Glass’ weekly hour of narratives told in the style of essays. On October 2, 2020, I listened to This American Life’s story on the investigation of Rebecca Allensworth, a law professor at Vanderbilt University, into the failures of the medical boards charged with disciplining doctors. “Trust Me I’m a Doctor” featured the case of Michael LaPaglia, a Tennessee emergency room doctor whose troubles began with the police arriving at his house after a complaint about a domestic disturbance.
In addition to the Glock 19 9 millimeter, the 45 quart-sized Mason jars of marijuana and the 127 glass pipes found at the LaPaglia residence, the police catalogued a pharmacopia that included diazepam, amphetamine, oxycodone, fentanyl, morphine, and propofol. LaPaglia pled no contest to the charges. The Tennessee medical medical board put him on probation and revoked the DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) registration number required to prescribe controlled substances (This American Life episode 719 | October 2, 2020: “Trust Me I’m a Doctor” / Act Two: Act Two, https://www.thisamericanlife.org/719/trust-me-im-a-doctor).
The story goes on from there, to a later arrest, charges for drug trafficking, and the failure of the Tennessee medical board to adequately respond. What caught my attention was not so much the evolution and extent of LaPaglia’s criminal enterprise, but the doctor’s efforts at damage control.
LaPaglia’s girlfriend told police the doctor had threatened to kill her with the fentanyl, morphine and propofol that the police found. The next day she filed a petition for a restraining order against LaPaglia saying, “Michael told me that if I ever contacted the police for help or reported his drug use, Michael would use his powers as a physician to have me committed to a psychiatric facility” (719: Trust Me I’m a Doctor / Act Two: Act Two transcript, https://www.thisamericanlife.org/719/transcript). LaPaglia told police she was “delusional.”
Claiming a woman is delusional appears to be a common theme in responding to victim complaints, perhaps both for white men who risk exposure and for criminal doctors. With the Glock and the drugs staring the police in the face, LaPaglia’s claim was probably an obvious ruse. Organized crimes like mobbing are not quite as obvious. In mobbing, risk is mitigated by combining defamation with unfamiliar phenomenologies of sound to ensure the victim who reports is almost ipso facto perceived to be mentally ill. Not to mention the fact that while there is general acceptance that cyber-stalking exists, a female victim who claims she is being cyber-stalked is assumed to be delusional. This is a form of discriminatory bias that protects criminals and deprives women of the legal recourse they are entitled to under constitutional and civil law.
LaPaglia told his girlfriend he would use his “powers” to have her committed. The idea that an accusation of criminal wrongdoing can be refuted by claiming the victim is delusional is remarkable. The fact that the police and prosecutor could be so easily fooled indicates the likelihood of bias as well as lack of training. Even more remarkable is the belief that one has the “power” to effect the commitment of another who is neither patient nor dependent. The willingness to evade prosecution not only by lying but by using one’s “powers” to ensure that a victim is perceived as lacking the legal competence required to testify in a court of law, or that the victim is stripped of her rights to self-determination, is an extraordinary form of abuse.
The conduct of physicians around the world is guided by a number of oaths and pledges that express their special obligations. The Hippocratic Oath is perhaps the best known of these. (“I will remember that I remain a member of society, with special obligations to all my fellow human beings, those sound of mind and body as well as the infirm.”) (“Hippocratic Oath,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippocratic_Oath). The Declaration of Geneva promulgated by the World Medical Association (WMA) expresses the postwar horror of medical professionals at the revelations of the 1947 Nazi Doctors Trial at Nuremberg (“Declaration of Geneva,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaration_of_Geneva#Creation). The Declaration is devoted to the acknowledgement of human rights within the sphere of medicine. (“I WILL NOT USE my medical knowledge to violate human rights and civil liberties, even under threat.”) Physicians who adhere to the tenets of the Declaration make a pledge to foster its noble traditions. (“I WILL FOSTER the honour and noble traditions of the medical profession.“) For the doctor who mobs, the public maintenance of these lofty attributes hides the evil they privately do.
Doctors and dentists no longer repeat the words of the Hippocratic Oath as they enter the profession. Despite updates over the years, the Oath is considered outdated in a field that serves a multiplicity of cultures and populations over the globe. Nevertheless, the healing arts are guided by the spirit of such oaths. The principles of “non-maleficence” (do no harm) and “beneficence” (doing good) remain fundamental to the field and are implicitly shared by the professionals who lay healing hands upon others.
An act of abuse on the scale of mobbing is predicated on a talent for duplicity coupled with the imperative to maintain a double life. (“I WILL PRACTICE my profession with conscience and dignity and in accordance with good medical practice.”) The medical practitioner who mobs must maintain the image that he or she is worthy of the trust we accord those who minister to our health, who witness our births and preside over our deaths. Perhaps the dichotomy represented by a doctor who mobs, this polarity between rendering aid and begetting violence, is the marker of a doctor for whom an oath means nothing.
The hypocrisy of being mobbed by neighborhood watch co-captains and others charged with the public good is striking. Block watch aspirants in Seattle join the ranks of block watches nationwide by liaison with the Seattle Police Department. A 2015 article in the Seattle Times provides an estimate of 2,000 to 3,000 active block watches throughout the city (“Man’s request for names of all block watch captains puzzles SPD,” Seattle Times, https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/crime/mans-request-for-names-of-all-block-watch-captains-puzzles-spd/). The psychopathology of doctors who mob surpasses the pervasive sociopathy of the nasty neighborhood watch lady. The advanced training of doctors is devoted to a mission of benevolence. They aspire to cherished principles as they assume positions of profound public trust. When doctors whose practice is founded on the exhortation to do no harm participate in criminal enterprise whose product is harm, the dichotomy is striking. Perhaps for some, the altruistic burden is too great.
Robert Louis Stevenson wrote the Gothic novella, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, in 1886. Stevenson unleashed the then shocking novel about a dual nature of outward goodness and inward evil in fewer than six days. The desperate theme of dualism explored in the work is critiqued to be inspired by Stevenson’s own struggles with illness and drugs. With its strong contrast between the public and the private, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is marked as a novel of its Victorian times. Given its focus on social hypocrisy, the novel sheds light on the unfortunate politics of Seattle’s South Cedar Park neighborhood.
When you’re being mobbed by doctors, by their lawyer friends, the neighborhood watch groups they’ve infiltrated and the real estate speculators their charade protects, you know the truth. You know the “evil” that resides on the other side on those walls when they’re next door, across the street when the instigating watch captain minds a rogue device in her vehicle every time you sit at the window, and up and down the street in neighborhoods transmogrified into police states run by militaristic LLCs (a reference to limited liability corporations that buy their way through neighborhoods, doing the work of hate groups as they expel residents and inflate property values to line their pockets).
You know what these people are because when the police aren’t around and when they’re not in the courtroom, these criminals don’t hide it, and they don’t hide the abuse. Bullying requires a display. Mobbing takes a village. When no one but you is around, they wear the psychopathology of mobbing with the conspicuousness of a brand. All the better to frighten you into giving them what they want.
Those who do not themselves witness the racketeering, the felony crimes, and the battering by voice and by sound, hear only the words of a white man granted entry into an esteemed profession. “I am a physician,” the north mobbing house owner introduced himself in the civil court proceeding in which my petition for an order of anti-harassment was summarily rejected when this man who is anything but noble stood and asked, for the benefit of a judge who even then knew less than I did about this technology-based crime, if it was true that I had told police I heard harassing voices on my devices. The implication to the judge was clear; with a pound of his gavel the matter was dismissed.
The effrontery of mobbers is evident in the facile duplicity with which they maintain the public pretense of ethical beneficence even as they execute strategies of sleep deprivation and batter their isolated victim every day and night, even as they damage her devices with the constant barrage of wireless sound, and even as they harangue her with threats and insults issued with the stunning casualness of those for whom criminal harassment is a business plan.
Given the mobbing crime that I have so far survived, it should not have surprised me when I was finally able to confirm that the medical professionals mobbing me were not the imposter doctors and dentists I hoped. It is disheartening that I was forced to endure false prosecution with two challenges to my competency and extensive personal damages after being made victim to mobbing at the hands of a corrupt Seattle neighborhood watch. Worse yet is finding that the Seattle Police Department and the City Attorney’s Office are so inept or biased that they either cannot recognize or refuse to act against a real estate scam enabled by technology and neighborhood watch corruption. It was eye-opening when I found that a woman who has viciously mobbed me from the house of the south mobbing owner since the early days of the mobbing and now resides there, is also a doctor. It was the owner of the south mobbing house owner on whose behalf the City of Seattle filed charges against me when I refused to abandon my tenancy after my attempt at an anti-harassment order was turned around on me and the south mobbing house owner and his attorney chum obtained an order against me. Irony does not describe the sentiment with which I recently read a legal brief documenting this woman’s testimony for the prosecution in a criminal case of child abuse that unfolded even as I was being assaulted from the house she shares next door during the early years of being mobbed in this dysfunctional Seattle enclave.
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